“Innovation Thinking Methods” by Osama Hashmi – BOOK SUMMARY

Innovation Thinking Methods for the modern entrepreneur: Disciplines of thought that can help you rethink industries and unlock 10x better solutions… by entrepreneur and startup community builder, Osama Hashmi.

In recent years, entrepreneurs have been focusing increasingly on lean startup techniques and incremental improvements: the next alarm clock, yet another to-do-list app, or the 100th dry-cleaning service.

Perhaps it’s time we restarted a conversation around ‘thinking big’… and coming up with those “10x better” solutions that get everybody excited. Luckily, the author has done much of the hard work, putting together over 20 frameworks to exercise those “10x better” problem-solving muscles.

For example, we can often find bigger and better questions by looking at the “negative space around a market”. Instead of asking how many screenwriters are in the world and what problem are they having, try asking “why aren’t more people screenwriters – why aren’t more stories being written?”

Or how about we look at what can be effectively “outsourced back to customers“? This approach can reduce operating costs and pricing so much, that it becomes impossible even for bigger incumbents to compete. Uber and Airbnb effectively outsource asset and inventory management back to customers, compared to the typical cab or hotel service.

And sometimes, seeking the “Original Intent” of WHY customers are buying specific products, can help us come up with completely new solutions. For example, journalists don’t want faster writing tools, they want ways to break news faster, and anything that helps them with that Original Intent would be immediately more valuable to them.

The author provides easy-to-adopt frameworks along with insights from his experiences, and the key questions to help unlock radical solutions. His goal is to help young entrepreneurs identify opportunities worth pursuing, in their quest to build meaningful things that truly make the world a better place.